A biased look at psychology in the world

Living History

March 01, 2015

For nine-year-old Cloretta Robinson, her strange odyssey apparently began on March 17, 1972. Known as "Cocoa" to her friends, she was sitting in her fifth-grade classroom at the Santa Fe Elementary School in Oakland, California when a friend noticed blood coming from Cloretta's left palm. Cloretta herself seemed unaware of the blood until her teacher interrupted the lesson to send the girl to see the school nurse.

It was the nurse, Susan Carson, who would later describe what was happening to reporters, “Her palms were bleeding when she first came in,” Mrs. Carlson said. “There isn’t any evidence of a wound. It was fresh blood. I wiped it off and after a while . . . it would appear again . . . there were no puncture wounds. I looked with a magnifying glass.”

Though the bleeding later stopped, that was hardly the end of the story for Cloretta. Over the course of the next few days, she would start bleeding again from different parts of her body, including her left and right feet, the right side of her thorax, and even from her forehead. The bleeding episodes would start and end with no discernible pattern.

Cloretta Robinson was bearing many of the supposedly miraculous signs of stigmata reported by Roman Catholic saints throughout the centuries. Except of course, for the fact that she was a young African-American girl whose family belonged to a small Baptist sect. Though she was deeply religious and even sang in her church choir, it was seeing a movie about The Passion on television on March 13 that apparently caused her to have a vivid dream about the Crucifixion just a few days before the first stigmata episode. She often had dreams about the Bible and religious themes but this renewed fascination with Christ's suffering, not to mention Good Friday falling on March 31 that year, presumably triggered the bleeding.

Stigmata (the plural of stigma) is the popular term used to describe the supposedly miraculous appearance of bleeding, wounds, or psychosomatic pain on parts of the body corresponding to Christ's crucifixion wounds. Primarily associated with the Roman Catholic faith, the first recorded stigmatist in history was St. Francis of Assisi (1182-1226) who was reportedly developed stigmata-like wounds on his body "while engaged in peaceful ecstasies of contemplation." The first of these episodes was said to have occurred when a six-winged seraph descended on him bearing Christ's cross. Since Francis' day, there have been more than three hundred stigmatists recorded of whom sixty were eventually canonized. The overwhelming majority of these cases have been women.

Interestingly enough, there was a tremendous upsurge in stigmata cases during the 16th and 17th centuries as the Protestant Reformation got underway but the number of cases fell to pre-Reformation levels only a century later. To help classify the stigmata cases that were arising then, Pope Benedict XIV (1675-1758) established formal guidelines to distinguish between natural wounds and supernatural ones. Among these guidelines were that stigmata needed to be: (i) sudden in appearance, (ii) show major tissue modifications, (iii) show persistence and inalterability despite all therapy, (iv) hemorrhage (bleeding), (v) absence of infection or suppuration (with some wounds even giving off a perfumed smell), and (vi) have a sudden and perfect disappearance.

Not all stigmatists have developed crucifixion wounds though. Some have reported tears of blood and having a cross-shaped wound appear on the forehead. Other female stigmatists developed a ring-like wound on their ring finger to mark their "betrothal or marriage with the Lord." Not all stigmata were visible however. St. Catherine of Siena (1347-1380) reported "invisible wounds" that caused her to feel the pain of the Crucifixion directly. During the 20th century, there have been numerous reported cases of stigmata of which the most famous were St. Pio of Pietrelcina (1887-1968) and Therese Neuman (1898-1962).

Explanations for stigmata have ranged from self-mutilation, purpura or internal bleeding, urticaria, or even as symptoms of conversion disorder. There does appear to be a strong link between developing stigmata and various mental disorders including obsessive-compulsive disorder, dissociative identity disorder, and anorexia nervosa. Self-starvation is also a common feature of stigmatics who are often trying to imitate Christ's suffering as much as possible.

The exact nature of visible stigmata seems to be strongly influenced by religious images of Christ's wound. For centuries, Christ was portrayed in statues and paintings as having had nails driven through the palms of his hands and, sure enough, virtually all stigmatics prior to this century with visible wounds show marks in their palms. More recently however, images of Christ as they appear on the Shroud of Turin show the nails having been driven through the wrists (to provide better support for Christ on the cross). Perhaps not coincidentally, more recent stigmata cases are showing wounds through their wrists instead.

As for Cloretta Robinson, her bleeding episodes kept occurring on a regular basis, from one to five times daily. Asked why this was happening, she simply replied, “It happens. It just sort of comes on, I don’t know before. It doesn’t hurt. I just look down and it’s there. I don’t know what it is." Aside from commenting on how "weird" the bleeding was, she seemed to take her stigmata in stride. Medical testing at the Children's Hospital Medical Center in Santa Fe found no indication of any physical disorder or family medical history that might explain what was happening. Aside from diagnosing her condition as "Easter Bleeding Syndrome", her doctors seemed as baffled as everyone else.

While her doctors were fairly skeptical about Cloretta's stigmata, her family and fellow churchgoers didn't seem to doubt that something miraculous was happening. Not only did her parents release photographs of the stigmata to the local newspapers but their pastor, Reverent Leonard Hester gave a sermon about Cloretta's bleeding episodes. A newspaper story about Cloretta had the title, "Child's Easter Bleeding Puzzles Parents, Doctors" and described how their lives had been changed by the bleeding. The publicity helped attract curiosity seekers and Cloretta's mother had to walk her daughter to school to keep the crowds away.

Based on what they observed with Cloretta Robinson, two of her doctors later coauthored an article titled, "A Case of Stigmata" for the Archives of General Psychiatry. In the article, they described Cloretta as a "pleasant, neatly and attractively groomed prepubescent black girl, cheerful, friendly, and somewhat reserved in her conversations with adult white men." They didn't find anything unusual in her home life or family situation and she didn't present with any symptoms suggestive of hysteria. About the only unusual thing about her emotional state was how little she seemed to care about her bleeding which they described as "a bit of “la belle indifference.”

What concerned the doctors most however were the auditory hallucinations that apparently developed not long after the bleeding started. While praying at bedtime, Cloretta reportedly heard voices telling her, among other things, that "your prayers will be answered." On Good Friday and Easter Sunday, she also heard voices telling her to pray with certain people who had illnesses she felt could be healed. The voices stopped after Easter Sunday and there were no further hallucinations. Though Cloretta denied any knowledge of the stigmata phenomenon prior to her own bleeding, she seemed to identify strongly with Jesus Christ and was preoccupied with His crucifixion.

Once her bleeding episodes started however, she learned about other famous stigmatics, including St. Francis of Assisi, and identified strongly with him as well. Just sitting in a room drawing pictures of St. Francis caused her bleeding to intensify and her doctors ruled out any possibility of self-mutilation in Cloretta's case. They concluded her red blood cells were somehow permeating her capillaries and penetrating the skin to cause the bleeding they witnessed directly. In their article, they stated that “One can no longer dispute the power of mental and emotional forces to control such physical phenomena. By analogy we need not doubt that profound, intense religious and emotional forces, conscious and unconscious, could cause stigmatic bleeding.”

After the bleeding episodes reached a climax on Good Friday with bleeding from her hands, feet, side of her thorax, and forehead simultaneously, the stigmata gradually subsided. Though the bleeding didn't return on the next Good Friday, the stigmata spontaneously returned two years later. Cloretta became a local celebrity in church circles and her minister preached sermons about her miraculous bleeding. He even conducted revival meetings where faith healing took place though her family learned to treat it as a "seasonal" problem.

There is little real information on what has since happened to Cloretta Robinson (who now goes by the surname of Starks). Despite the publicity that surrounded her, she has managed to regain her privacy with no mention of her appearing in any newspapers since that turbulent period in her life. Though she might have been proclaimed a saint in another time and place, "Cocoa" Robinson-Starks is largely remembered today for being one of the most well-documented cases of stigmata in recent years. She can also be seen as a good example of the powerful effect that the mind can have on the body.

February 27, 2015

It was a problem that was all too common during the 18th and 19th centuries.

In an era before contraception and abortion became safe and affordable, women who found themselves pregnant and unmarried were often faced with harsh choices. Though abortions were still available to those who could afford them, they were extremely dangerous, not to mention illegal in most places. Some desperate women resorted to infanticide of their newborn infants though the ones who were caught often faced imprisonment, or even execution.

And then there were the economic and legal barriers women trying to raise children by themselves faced. In the United Kingdom, for instance, the English Poor Laws declared all illegitimate children to be the sole responsibility of their mothers until they were sixteen years old. Mothers of illegitimate children were also deemed "immoral" and banned from mixing with "respectable" women in the workhouses that were often the only real alternative for women left to fend for themselves. In some countries, women who had given birth to illegitimate children were often sent to Magdalene laundries while their children were abandoned to orphanages until they were old enough to be put to work (typically before puberty).

Even the traditional practice of "abandoning a baby on a doorstep" was illegal and mothers faced prosecution if caught. Being an unwed mother was considered a dark sin in many households and social services as we know them today were nonexistent. Those women who could not be safely married off (usually in marriages of convenience) were sent away to prevent bringing shame to their families.

And thus the "Baby Farming Industry" sprang up in many countries. The term "baby farming" was first coined in a British Medical Journal article published in 1867 though the practice was already well-established by then. For a modest fee, women in need could arrange for their newborn babies to be cared and educated with no awkward questions being asked. Pregnant women could conceal their pregnancies by appearing to take a rest holiday in a country setting far from home. After giving birth, they could recover and return to their normal lives with nobody being the wiser while their infants were left in the baby farmer's care. Unfortunately, there were no real child welfare laws in place and no safeguards to prevent actual abuse taking place. While most baby farmers were conscientious in caring for their charges, the prospect of turning a quick profit drew in many unscrupulous people as well.

In the United Kingdom for instance, baby farms were completely unregulated until 1872 (though laws preventing animal mistreatment had been in place far longer). In his classic novel, Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens attempted to raise public awareness of what was happening on the baby farms of his time and the appalling conditions some children had to endure. He also wrote that:

It did perversely happen in eight cases out of ten, either that it sickened from want and cold, or fell into the fire from neglect, or got half-smothered by accident; in any one of which cases, the miserable little being was summoned into another world, and there gathered to the fathers it had never known in this.

In leaving their children with baby farmers, mothers either made a lump-sum payment or else arranged regular payments of a few shillings per week. While many baby farmers promised to find a good home for their charges, whether through formal adoption or foster care, actual follow-up was rare. In many cases, mothers were fully aware of the high mortality rate and even took that into account in deciding what to do with their infants.

As for how the baby farmers found customers, that was rarely difficult. Discreet newspaper ads listing just a post office box would read:

Nurse child wanted, or to adopt - A Widow with a little family of her own, and moderate allowance from her late husband's friends, would be glad to accept the charge of a young child. Age no object. If sickly, would receive a parent's care. Terms: Fifteen shillings a week or would adopt entirely if under two months for the small sum of Twelve pounds.

With no questions being asked, more sinister baby farmers could make their money by taking in as may sickly infants as they could. Infant mortality was high in those days so few suspicions would be raised if the baby farmer's charges died as soon as possible. Drugging an infant's milk with laudanum or some other discreet poison would be followed by the body being quietly dumped into a river, abandoned in the street, or buried privately (funeral costs were expensive). Older children, whose mothers had tried to care for them for a while, often lived grim lives and frequently starved to death.

One of the most notorious baby farmers of the 19th century was Margaret Waters who lived in Peckham, London. After her husband abandoned her, she eventually turned to baby farming but quickly discovered that the fees she charged did not cover the expenses involved in caring for the children she took in. Along with drugging her charges to keep them quiet and slowly starving them, she would also abandon them whenever she could do it discreetly. Not surprisingly, many of the babies in her care ended up dying, whether due to starvation or one of the various diseases associated with malnutrition. To save on burial fees, she would wrap the bodies in paper and leave them in the streets to be found.

This was what led to her undoing as police began investigating the infant deaths. Sergeant Richard Rief of the London Metropolitan police began investigating all the local baby farmers to discover the source of the infant bodies being found. When he came to Margaret Waters' house, he found numerous children living in appalling conditions. Some were on the verge of death from starvation. In one makeshift crib, he found a baby that looked barely human due to extreme emaciation. As he would later tell the court, the baby seemed "more monkey than child". There were also older children in Waters' care as well but they seemed little better off. She was eventually convicted for the murder of five infants but was generally believed to have killed as many as nineteen. On October 11, 1870, Margaret Waters was hanged making her the first woman to be executed for baby-farming in the United Kingdom.

But she was hardly the only baby-farmer who would come to police attention. One notorious baby-farmer, Amelia Elizabeth Dyer, was likely the most prolific baby murderer of all. Her trademark involved strangling babies with white tape and was often forced to move her operations to different towns to avoid suspicious doctors. By the time police caught up with her, she had been a baby-farmer for fifteen years and may have killed as many as four hundred babies. Despite an insanity plea, she was hanged in 1896. Other criminal cases involving baby-farmers committing murder were reported across the United Kingdom as well as Australia, New Zealand, Germany and Denmark. In German and Scandinavian countries, there was a gruesome euphemism for this practice: "Engelmacherin" meaning "angel-maker."

Publicity over cases such as Margaret Waters and Amelia Dyer led to widespread outrage. Even honest women who truly cared for their charges didn't dare call themselves baby farmers due to the widespread notoriety associated with the term. The Infant Life Protection Society (ILPS) was founded in Britain and Societies for Prevention of Cruelty to Children in the United States, largely due to the publicity surrounding cases of murder associated with baby farming. Through pressure from members of the Infant Life Protection Society, the U.K. government passed the Infant Life Protection Act of 1872. The act was a dismal failure though and unscrupulous baby farmers (such as Amelia Dyer) were still free to murder infants.

Eventually, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children spread across the U.K. as it had in other countries and the first act to protect children from abuse was passed in 1889. That the new act was still inadequate because obvious enough with the shocking testimony at the Amelia Dyer trial. This led to the passage of the Infant Protection Act of 1897 giving even more extensive protections for children. The Act stated that, ""no infant could be kept in a home that was so unfit and so overcrowded as to endanger its health, and no infant could be kept by an unfit nurse who threatened, by neglect or abuse, its proper care and maintenance." Police also had the power to investigate all suspected baby farms to weed out the criminally unfit ones.

In 1906, one of the first modern Children's acts was passed which established formal supervision for all foster mothers but eradicating criminal baby farming took a joint effort by the Society, various police agencies, and local governments. By 1920, criminal baby farming had virtually disappeared. Adoption of illegitimate children became more acceptable and many of the legal loopholes that had allowed the baby farmers to work undetected had been plugged. By 1946, baby farming was made illegal across the U.K. by an Act of Parliament.

Most other countries that had allowed baby farming largely followed the same pattern with modern Child Welfare agencies forming to regulate child adoption and foster homes. In the United States, the crackdown on baby farms was spurred on by exposes such as George Walker's 1918 book, The Traffic in Babies which dealth with his findings relating to two baby farms in Baltimore.

As the stigma surrounding illegitimacy largely subsided, mothers were free to raise their infants themselves without the need to abandon or farm them out. By the 1940s, the Victorian concept of the "fallen woman" had been replaced by the more practical view that mothers and their children were better off remaining together. For those mothers unwilling or unable to care for their children, adoption agencies allowed for a humane alternative. Still, despite the advent of better contraceptive methods and safer abortions, the problem of unwanted pregnancy remains in many places.

While the era of the baby farm seems truly over, at least in most countries, the current backlash against making abortion and contraception freely available to women of all ages has helped unravel many of the gains of previous decades. When even child welfare services are being undermined by legislators and sexual abstinence programs are being promoted despite their ineffectiveness, the desperation faced by pregnant women forced to resort to baby farmers seems far too familiar.

February 22, 2015

Though the abduction attempt should have ruined him, John Carden found himself a hero instead. The story of his unrequited love for Eleanor and the extreme lengths he had gone to for her sake drew numerous admirers the crowd that gathered around the prison to support him, mostly women. Though his stalking attempts may be regarded as a sign of mental illness today, Victorian society saw him as an irrepressible romantic and poor Eleanor found herself cast as the villain of the story. Some prominent members of Irish high society even visited Carden's cell to wish him better luck in future abduction attempts.

When the case came to court at the end of July, 1852, it became a major social event with numerous society women demanding seats to watch Carden defend himself. According to one news story describing the trial:

"the gates of the court were besieged by respectably-dressed people so early as seven o'clock in the morning... Admission was by only obtained by ticket; and when the doors were at length thrown open, at nine o'clock, the galleries were soon filled with an array of fashionable ladies, who manifested the deepest interest in the proceedings, and the rest of the court was crowded in every available part."

John Carden and his three henchmen were charged with abduction, attempted abduction, and felonious assault. There seemed little doubt that Carden would be convicted considering the strength of the evidence against him and, naturally enough, Eleanor Arbuthnot testified against him. Despite her testimony though, the lovesick Carden ordered his lawyer not to cross-examine her. The abduction charge was dropped after Eleanor admitted on the witness stand that she had not actually been dragged from the carriage. As for the women in the courtroom, they demonstrated their solid supported Carden every chance they could get. They even cheered when the felonious assault charge was dropped and Carden was only given two years for attempted abduction.

While a few newspapers were bold enough to condemn Carden (one even suggested that he "'stands more in need of a straight-waistcoat than of a wife"), just about everyone else in Irish society seemed to be on his side. He was given the chance to have his prison term suspended if he would only promise to sign a promissory note that he wouldn't go near Eleanor again, but Carden insisted on serving his full sentence instead. When he was released in 1856, he renewed his campaign to marry poor Eleanor and even traveled to India to persuade her brother to help him (which didn't work). Other members of the Gough family he approached flatly told him to stay away from them.

With no chance of visiting the Gough estate as a legitimate visitor, he tried recruiting members of the household staff to run interference for him. His clumsy attempts at infiltrating the Gough house led to yet another court case. Though Eleanor Arbuthnot flatly insisted in court that she was frightened of Carden and never wanted to see him again, he refused to accept this and continued blaming her family for pressuring her to reject him. How the entire saga was covered by the newspapers says a lot about Engliah-Irish relations at the time since Irish newspapers tended to support their fellow Irishman Carden while condemning Eleanor as a snobbish Englishwoman. On the other hand, English papers such as The Times wrote sarcastic editorials about Irish suitors who couldn't take "no" for an answer.

Despite his repeated attempts to win over Eleanor and her continuing to refuse him, John Carden's obsession never really faded. To his dying day, he spent much of his fortune fixing up his estate to make it suitable for his intended bride, Still, while he became famous for entertaining guests, Carden died an impoverished bachelor in 1866 after a brief illness. His brother, Andrew, inherited the somewhat run-down estate.

As for Eleanor Arbuthnot, Carden's supporters continually denounced her as being heartless for not giving in to Carden. The fact that she was an English heiress made her a popular target for Irish nationalists who blamed her for the entire mess. Her family even discouraged her from appearing in public due to Carden supporters hissing at her in the streets. While people who actually knew her described Eleanor as being kind-hearted and pleasant, the problems she faced over this harassment likely contributed to her never marrying. She was eventually forced to move to Edinburgh to get away from the pro-Cardenites and dedicated the rest of her life to helping to raise her sister's children. Eleanor Arbuthot died herself in 1894. Needless to say, she and Carden are buried far apart from each other.

Long after Carden's death, the story of his obsessive love for Eleanor inspired numerous folk songs including one favourite classic, "Carden's Wild Domain" which is still sung in some parts of Ireland. That, and the ruins of the once-great house that John Rutter Carden spent much of his fortune improving to impress his intended, are all that really remain of what has to be one of the most famous examples of obsessive love in Irish history.

It wouldn't be until 1921 when French psychiatrist Gaetan Gatian de Clearambault first published his treatise, "Les psychoses passionelles", describing the condition now known as erotomania (also known as de Clerembault's syndrome in his honour). Defined as a type of delusion that another person is in love with them, often without any real evidence to support it, erotomania is one of the chief motivators for stalking behaviour. Whether it involves a celebrity or not, this kind of obsession is taken much more seriously nowadays, especially following incidents such as the 1981 shooting of President Ronald Reagan by an man obsessed with actress Jodie Foster and the 1989 murder of actress Rebecca Schaeffer.

While not every case of erotomania necessarily leads to violence, the emotional toll that stalking can have on the women and men who find themselves targeted is often overwhelming. And, much like poor Eleanor Arbuthnot, victims of erotomania often find themselves being re-victimized by accusations that they were somehow at fault for the obsession. Even as laws against stalking and harassment have become more stringent though, the Internet has opened up whole new opportunities for cyberstalkers making it easier than ever to go after intended victims.

As stalking victim surveys in many countries typically report a lifetime prevalence of ten to twenty percent for women and a smaller percentage for men, the obsessive love that terrified Eleanor Arbuthnot for much of her life is definitely still with us today.

February 19, 2015

It all began on February 11, 1933 when a 21-year old student named Kiyoko Matsumoto committed suicide by throwing herself into the volcanic crater of Mount Mihara on the Japanese island of Izu Oshima. Matsumoto, a student at Tokyo's Jissan College, developed an infatuation with fellow student Masako Tomita. In a poignant letter, she wrote "Dearest, I am bewildered to distraction by the perplexities of maturing womanhood. I can stand the strain no longer. What shall I do? I should like to jump into a volcano." As it happened, Tomita knew just the ideal spot for such a romantic gesture. Since lesbian relationships were considered taboo in Japanese culture at the time, both she and Tomita decided to travel together to the volcano so that Matsumoto could end her life there.

Mount Mihara was already a well-known suicide site since an observation post near the top of the volcanic cone allowed visitors to look straight down into the lava. Even as early as the 1920s, people could commit suicide by jumping into the volcano though incidents such as this were relatively rare since there were more practical alternatives including jumping off one of Tokyo's skyscrapers. Unfortunately for Matsumoto, business owners had recently put a stop to high-rise suicides by placing security barriers at the top of those buildings where suicides had taken place. Though determined jumpers could still find accessible buildings, Masako Tomito telling all her friends at school about Matsumoto's death would establish Mount Mihara as a new suicide venue. Along with the poignant goodbye note she had left behind, the story of a young student ending her life that way would eventually inspire a series of copycat suicides. Kiyoko Matsumoto's suicide became a media sensation across Japan as news agencies picked up the story and made her a celebrity. Her goodbye note was reprinted in the newspapers and Mount Mihara suddenly attracted a new wave of tourists and curiosity seekers. Masako Tomita became a celebrity as well and, according to a Times news article from 1935, died not long afterward though the cause of death was not given.

To profit from the volcano's new popularity, Jinnojo Hayashi, president of Tokyo Bay Steamship Company set up a daily steamship line to the island where it was located and the observation post near the top of the mountain picked up the new name: "Suicide Point". Visitors wishing to visit the volcano could ride donkeys and horses up the steep mountain so they could look into the lava for themselves. The poor fishing community at the foot of the volcano prospered with the new tourist trade. Though authorities were already becoming alarmed by the prospect of copycat deaths, they did little to discourage it at first (suicide was not illegal under Japanese law). In 1933 alone, 944 people (804 men, 140 women) would jump into the crater. The two years that followed saw an additional 350 suicides and 1386 attempted suicides on Mount Mihara and visitors would often travel there just to watch people jump.

Newspapers also played on Kiyoko Matsumoto's sexual orientation and "lesbian suicide" became a new cultural meme in Japan. Even before Matsumoto's death, suicide was hardly uncommon in women facing problems coming to terms with their sexuality, For lesbians in particular, living in a country with little tolerance for sexual minorities provided few options except for suffering in silence. The rise in suicides among women was alarming enough for Nobuko Jo of the Old Women's Home in Kobe, Japan to establish a widescale movement designed to prevent further deaths. She helped set up shelters which she called "Wait-a-bits" where people would could reconsider killing themselves. "The pause for reflection is vital," she said in one public statement, "Achieve that and the unfortunate woman generally saves herself. The thing is to ease their hysteria, if only for a few hours, and get them away from hysterical friends." Along with Wait-a-bits, she also established shelters for homeless women across Japan and credited her movement with preventing thousands of deaths.

There was also the romantic aspect of Matsumoto's death which caused Mount Mihara to became a popular spot for mutual suicide pacts (known as shinjuu in Japan). Until the outbreak of World War 2, as many as 45 couples would commit suicide each year by throwing themselves into the volcano. In one shinjuu case from 1956, 27-year old Fumisuke Onodera and 21-year old Chieko Numakura of Tokyo both decided on suicide after learning of Numakura's bone tuberculosis. Though they both jumped into the volcano, they actually landed on a ledge about ten metres (30 feet) above the lava. After reconsidering their suicide decision, Onodera tried to climb out with Numakura on his back though he could not manage to get her out alone. He eventually made it to the top by himself and arranged for her rescue. Though badly burned, they both survived.

The Mount Mihara suicide epidemic eventually ended through enhanced security to prevent suicides and making it a criminal offense to purchase a one-way ticket to the island. While suicide is likely still possible for someone sufficently determined, there are usually more accessible places available. Even today, suicide in Japan remains a major social issue and the suicide rate is one of the highest in the world. While methods tend to vary (and certain places such as Japan's Aokigahara Forest remain popular), authorities stay alert to the possibility of copycat suicides following high-profile deaths. In recent years, the suicides of musicians Yukiko Okada and hide triggered small copycat suicide clusters although nothing on the scale following Kiyoko Matsumoto's death.

Still, the rapid rise of suicides in Japan during the 1990s (1998 saw a 34.7% increase from the previous year) and the number of suicides linked to the recent economic downturn has led to a call for stronger action. A new government initiative has been put into place to reduce suicides 20% by 2017 with billions of yen being allocated for anti-suicide measures including greater access to counseling. Though early signs are encouraging, the popularity of internet suicide websites listing different ways of committing suicide using household chemicals demonstrates that the suicide epidemic is far from over.

February 15, 2015

By all accounts, it was love at first sight. Unfortunately, that love was completely one-sided.

John Rutter Carden was a 41-year old Irish landowner who had somewhat of a reputation as a ladies man and an eccentric (he once drove off some his trespassing tenants using a cannon mounted on the roof of his house). While the tenants living on his Tipperary estate were often less than thrilled with him, he was generally regarded as tough but fair and a favourite of many of his neighbouring landowners.

Everything changed for him in 1852 when he was invited to stay with some friends in County Cork in 1852. It was there that he was introduced to the Honourable Mrs. George Gough of Rathronan House and her two younger sisters, Laura and Eleanor Arbuthnot. Since their parents were dead, both Laura and Eleanor stood to inherit a vast estate but that didn't appear to be what first attracted Carden to the 18-year-old Eleanor. While managing not to scare his intended off right away, he began planning his strategy for winning Eleanor's heart.

Given the age difference between them, Carden didn't make his intentions known to the Goughs for some time. Instead, he took advantage of every opportunity to visit their home and invite them to his home as well. Since direct proposals were out of fashion at the time, Carden instead approached her older sister, Mrs. Gough, for Eleanor's hand in marriage. She flatly rejected his proposal. Not only didn't Eleanor have the slightest interest in Carden, but her family considered her to be too young to even consider marriage. He was told not to approach Eleanor again and to find someone else to marry.

But John Carden refused to take no for an answer. Since Eleanor hadn't refused him to his face, he constructed an elaborate fantasy that she really wanted to accept but was simply too shy to say so. Blaming her family for keeping them apart, he became obsessed with getting Eleanor away from them so that she could be free to marry him. When he wrote to Eleanor about his plan to "rescue" her, she naturally showed it to her relatives and the Gough family flatly told him never to try contacting her again. Eleanor also wrote a brief note to Carden telling him that she was deeply insulted by his letter.

John Carden appeared to accept this rejection though he was privately crushed. Since Carden and Eleanor's family were landed gentry who often met at local events and get-togethers, they continued to meet socially from time to time. He even managed to talk to Eleanor on occasion (but never alone). Still determined to get her away from the Gough family, Carden came up with a scheme to kidnap her and win her love that way.

Learning that the Goughs and the Arbuthnot sisters were traveling to Scotland to attend a ball, Carden quickly traveled to Scotland to show up at the same party unexpectedly. His presence there terrified Eleanor, especially since he kept staring at her all night. On the following day, he walked twenty miles just to have a chance to stare at her while she went by in a carriage. But if Eleanor and her family found that frightening, they would have been even more terrified if they knew what he was planning.

To get Eleanor to himself, Carden began working out an elaborate scheme to kidnap Eleanor and take her away on a yacht that he would have waiting for them. Aboard the yacht, he arranged for an exclusive cabin for his beloved, complete with an expensive wardrobe for the sea voyage. He spent a fortune purchasing the yacht and fitting it with every luxury he could devise. He even hired servants who had once worked at her home.

In the meantime, Carden continued to turn up everywhere that Eleanor and her family went. Though he pretended that these "meetings" were accidental, the Goughs were increasingly bothered by what he was doing. Once they left Scotland and returned to Ireland, Carden followed them back home as well. After Eleanor injured herself by falling from a horse, Carden lost any chance at seeing her at all since he was banned from her family's home.

Being forcibly cut off from Eleanor made Carden more frantic than ever. Carden even offered Eleanor's guardian all of his money in return for being allowed to marry her. To get her away from Carden, Mrs. Gough took Eleanor to Paris for convalescence and, sure enough, Carden followed them there aboard his new yacht. He had more sense than to approach them though and simply waited until their return to Ireland.

It was on June 2, 1854 that John Carden finally went ahead with his kidnapping scheme. While Eleanor, her two sisters, and the family governess were traveling to church in their carriage, Carden was following them on his horse when, suddenly, three men burst out of a ditch, seized the horses, and threatened the coach driver, with their knives. Carden tried to take Eleanor out of the carriage but the governess successfully fought him off. While Carden managed to pull the governess out of the carriage, the three men, who had been hired by Carden, assumed she was his intended and tried to help him abduct her.

Meanwhile, two men from the Gough's estate came to help the women fight off Carden and his gang while Mrs. Gough ran to the house screaming for help. Carden tried to take Eleanor again but she and her sister fought him off. When men from the Gough estate finally showed up, Carden ordered his men to start shooting but they all ran instead. Police were finally called in and the entire gang was captured nearly twenty miles away. Carden was placed in prison pending his court hearing.

February 13, 2015

On September 15, 1985, a seemingly innocent package was delivered to the home of Dr. James V. McConnell, then-professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. His assistant, Nicklaus Suino, opened the package as Dr. McConnell looked on. The resulting explosion resulted in Suino sustaining injuries to his arms and abdomen. Dr. McConnell was more fortunate although he suffered a hearing loss as a result of the blast. It remains unclear exactly why Theodore Kaczynski (a.k.a. the Unabomber) targeted Dr. McConnell as he had others in the scientific community but Dr. McConnell's colourful career may provide a clue.

Considered a maverick in his time, James V. McConnell's career was marked by his unconventional research and outspokenness. In his most famous research project, he classically conditioned Planaria (flatworms) to react to bright lights using electric shocks. He then cut up his research subjects and fed them to other Planaria and he found that the cannibal Planaria learned to respond to the bright light more rapidly than control Planaria did. In his classic paper Memory transfer through cannibalism in planaria which was published in the Journal of Neurophysiology, he suggested that memory was chemically based and that the memory transfer had been accomplished through what he termed memory RNA. While it was an intriguing finding at the time, other researchers have not been able to replicate his results and the concept of memory transfer fell by the wayside.

Despite the failure of his memory transfer research,James McConnell's tenure at the University of Michigan from 1956 to his retirement in 1988 was marked by his candour on issues that mattered to him as well as his quirky humour. In addition to launching the Journal of Biological Psychology, he also started the Worm-Runner's Digest (a humour magazine with a planaria theme). It may well have been McConnell's views on human behaviourl modification as outlined in his textbook Understanding Human Behavior that led to his being targeted by the Unabomber.

I have a personal anecdote about James V. McConnell that I feel inclined to share (it's my blog, after all). When I was a first year psychology student at the University of Windsor (just across the river from Michigan), Dr. McConnell gave a lecture on classical conditioning that was distinctly memorable. He explained the difference between a conditioned stimulus (CS) and an unconditioned stimulus (UCS) by firing off a starter's pistol whenever he shouted the phrase "CS" in a crowded auditorium. The idea was to condition us to flinching whenever he uttered that phrase (it was a more innocent time). We picked up the finer points of classical conditioning pretty quickly, let me tell you. I wanted to compliment him afterward on an excellent lecture but I was a shy undergraduate then (plus he had a gun).

Dr. McConnell passed away in 1990 and psychology became a little less colourful with his death. I have often thought that modern psychology tends to be a little too serious for its own good. Mavericks like James V. McConnell are all too rare these days.

February 10, 2015

In 1955, there were 560,000 patients in psychiatric hospital across the United States. Today, there are only 45,000. Since the U.S. population has doubled over that same time period, that means that the number of hospital beds for mental patients has declined to levels not seen in the United States since the 1840s. And this has remained virtually unchanged over the past forty years despite the clear need for improved mental health care.

With no beds to care for them and horrendously long waiting lists for the few services that are available, many people dealing with severe mental illness find themselves trapped in limbo created by well-meaning social policies and economic reality. For people dealing with major mental illness, including schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, receiving proper mental health care is usually made even harder by their difficulty functioning in the community. Family members often find themselves unable to provide proper care and experience burnout as a result. Mental patients without families are forced to rely on community care programs (when they exist). Far too often, these mental patients find themselves either out on the streets or caught up in a prison system that was never designed to accomodate them. Having seen this myself during the years when I worked in the Ontario correctional system, I can certainly appreciate how desperate the situation can be for them.

But is there a way out of this dilemma? A provocative new paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association investigates an option that is certain to be controversial in its own right: rehabilitating the reputation of psychiatric hospitals as places where mentally ill people can really get the help they need. Written by three bioethicists at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine, the paper points out that the current disastrous state of mental health care in most countries is due to the long-term trend towards deinstitutionalization that led to the closure or downsizing of most psychiatric hospitals over the past sixty years.

“It’s really not as radical as it sounds,” says Dominic A. Sisti, one of the authors of the paper in an interview with Quartz magazine. Not only have psychiatrists been calling for expanding psychiatric facilities for years, but it was largely because of the repressive practices of many asylums in the past that the stigma against hospitals first developed. By reestablishing hospitals as sanctuaries where people in need might get the help they need, many of the current problems surrounding mental health care might be avoided.

Beginning in the 1940s and 1950s, psychiatric patients were slowly released into the community both as a cost-cutting measure and a misplaced faith in the effectiveness of new medications for controlling mental illness. During the 1960s, this trend towards deinstitutionalization was boosted by the patients' rights advocacy groups who insisted that psychiatric hospitalization was an infringement on civil rights. As hospital beds closed, the community care programs that were meant to take their place largely failed to materialize and patients were often left to fend for themselves.

From the 1970s onward, the number of psychiatric hospital beds has remained steady though the need has been steadily growing as mental patients grow older and are less able to care for themselves. The problem has been aggravated by the practice of "patient dumping" with some hospitals emptying beds by transporting released patients to other jurisdictions where they might be someone else's problem. In other cases, patients might be transferred to nursing homes or general hospitals that are not equipped to provide the round-the-clock care needed.

There are successful community programs in place for many people dealing with mental illness. These include the Fountain House program using the clubhouse model of psychosocial rehabilitation. Beginning in New York City in 1949, there are now over four hundred Fountain Houses worldwide which are aimed at fighting the stigma of mental illness and helping patients live in the community. Still, not all people with mental illness can handle living independently in the community and may frequently get in trouble with the law as a result.

Though the stigma surrounding psychiatric hospitals is still strong, allowing prisons to become the default option for many people with mental illness is no solution. All too often, prisons have no choice but to put mentally ill prisoners into solitary confinement which typically makes their condition even worse. And the costs of housing mental ill prisoners tend to be far higher than prisoners without mental illness. In Texas for example, it costs $30000 to $50000 a year to house a mentally ill inmate compared to an average of $22000 a year for inmates without mental illness. This will likely rise in the near future now that the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the current state of treatment in most prisons amounts to cruel and unusual punishment. That means that new facilities must be built to provide better treatment.

Certainly, building new psychiatric hospitals won't be a cure-all for reforming psychiatric services. High-functioning patients with mild forms of mental illness will continue to function in the community with proper outpatient treatment. Still, as Dominic A. Sisti and his co-authors point out in concluding their paper:

"Asylums are a necessary but not sufficient component of a reformed spectrum of psychiatric services. A return to asylum-based long-term psychiatric care will not remedy the complex problems of the US mental health system, especially for patients with milder forms of mental illness who can thrive with high-quality outpatient care. Reforms that ignore the importance of expanding the role of such institutions will fail mental health patients who cannot live alone, cannot care for themselves, or are a danger to themselves and others."

Though the cost of building new hospitals will be high, it is a better alternative than what is happening now. Allowing the prison system to house the most violent patients while leaving the rest to fend for themselves isn't working. And, as the past forty years have demonstrated, this is one problem that won't go away if we continue to ignore it.

February 08, 2015

In 1941, the prospect of curing mental patients with a simple brain operation must have seemed like the answer to the prayers of parents such as Rose and Joseph Kennedy. Unfortunately, the reality was far more horrible than anyone really realized.

Though not the first surgeon to operate on the human brain. it was Portuguese neurologist Antonio Egas Moniz who first popularized lobotomies as a humane alternative to the often brutal asylums that were used to house the mentally ill in most places. By severing the neural connections between the brain's prefrontal areas and the rest of the brain, Moniz hoped to suppress the violent behaviour of many mental patients and make them more manageable. This procedure involved drilling two holes in the skull and inserting a thin surgical instrument known as a leucotome. By carefully rotating the leucotome, the surgeon could carefully severe the brain fibers. It was extremely delicate surgery which could only be done by skilled neurosurgeons. Beginning with his first successful operation in 1935, Moniz' research results earned him an international reputation as well as the 1949 Nobel prize in medicine.

Moniz' procedure proved to be extremely popular despite the complex nature of the operation. Lobotomies began to be carried out in numerous countries to treat a wide range of psychiatric conditions. Still, it was American neurologist Walter Freeman who really launched the psychosurgery movement in the United States. By modifying what Moniz had done and developing a more streamlined procedure known as a transorbital lobotomy, Freeman would transform the lives of thousands of patients (if not in the way that was originally intended).

Freeman's new procedure involved inserting a tool similar to an icepick beneath the eyelid and hammering it into the brain through the thin bone of the eye socket. By manipulating the surgical tool, it was possible to sever key brain fibers much in the same way Moniz had done. Not only was Freeman's new procedure much simpler, but Freeman suggested that it could be carried out in virtually any hospital or prison. It could even be done under a local anesthetic with the patient being awake during the operation. After conducting the first of these operations on a live patient in 1936, Freeman became the chief advocate of using lobotomies on any potential violent patient or inmate.

Though other neurologists were leery of brain surgery of this magnitude, the prospect of curing previously untreatable patients with a simple operation helped overcome any resistance. Beginning in 1943, the U.S. government adopted Freeman's procedure to deal with thousands of problem patients. The Veterans' Administration endorsed the operation as well and more than two thousand U.S. veterans would be lobotomized over a twelve-year period. As well, lobotomies were performed on prisoners, mental patients, and anyone else who could presumably be helped based on Freeman's own enthusiastic pronouncements about how well his procedure worked, By 1951, more than 18,000 patients would be lobotomized in the United States alone despite warnings from Freeman's critics that his magical operation was too good to be true.

And so it proved with Rosemary Kennedy. It is still unclear who persuaded her parents to allow the operation or what they had hoped to accomplish with it. Some sources suggest that it was Joseph Kennedy alone who authorized the surgery though Rose indicated in her own memoirs that she agreed to it as well. Though exact details of the lobotomy performed on Rosemary aren't available, the profound effect that it had on her were apparent from the very beginning. The original purpose of the operation had to curb Rosemary's aggressive behaviour and, in that respect,the lobotomy was a success, but at a horrible price. Rosemary was no longer the mildly retarded young woman her family knew.

As Rose Kennedy would describe later, her daughter had been reduced to a "childlike level" which left her completely incapable of caring for herself. Not only was she unable to speak more than a few words, but she had to learn to walk all over again. While she had formerly led a semi-autonomous life at the convent school where she had been living, this was no longer possible for her. Acting on the advice of Cardinal Richard Cushing, a trusted advisor of the Kennedy family, Rosemary's parents sent her to St. Coletta's convent in Wisconsin where she would spend the rest of her life. And it was there that she was reportedly abandoned by her family. Not only did her mother not visit her for many yearss afterward, but she become virtually forgotten as far as the rest of the world was concerned. Her father scarcely mentioned her at all in his private correspondence once she went to the convent.

Not until her brother John became President in 1960 would anyone in the family publicly acknowledge Rosemary's disability. Up to that time, her disappearance was put down to her being a recluse or even working as a teacher for the disabled. When Rosemary's disability was finally revealed, she was referred to as mentally retarded with no mention of the lobotomy. Still, her brother John visited her secretly as he was running for President and it was during his term in office that the first Presidential Panel on Mental Retardation was established. Despite this public acknowledgement, Rosemary was confined to the convent. It was only after her father's death in 1969 that her family allowed her to leave the convent on brief visits to the family home in Cape Cod.

Following Rose Kennedy's stroke in 1984, it was Rosemary's sister, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, who took over as her primary caregiver while the rest of her family continued to visit her as their busy schedules allowed. When Rosemary finally died of natural causes in a Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin hospital in 2005, Senator Edward Kennedy and all of his surviving sisters were at her beside. The family statement included in her obituary described her as a "lifelong jewel to every member of our family, From her earliest years, her mental retardation was a continuing inspiration to each of us and a powerful source of our family's commitment to do all we can to help all persons with disabilities live full and productive lives."

Even today, biographers continue to question the motivation behind Rosemary's lobotomy. Despite her parents' concerns about their daughter's behavioural problems, there seems little doubt that her borderline intelligence would have allowed her to function well enough to have a chance at a regular life, if not to the high expectations of her family. "Joe had two principal concerns about Rosemary," wrote Barbara Gibson and Ted Schwarz in their book, Rose Kennedy and Her Family: The Best and Worst of Their Lives and Times. "She was not the competition-oriented ideal of Kennedy womanhood, and he thought her sexuality was too intense and untempered by the moral strictures to which the other daughters had adhered. Joe destroyed a portion of her brain rather than risk what she might become if allowed to follow her own path in life."

Though neither of her parents realized the profound effect that the lobotomy would have on Rosemary, the guilt over what happened to her likely stayed with them for the rest of their lives. This was especially evident by the enormous financial contribution that made to support research into the causes of mental retardation. In 1946, Rosemary's father established the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation which established research centres across the United States to promote greater awareness of intellectual disabilities. Along with research funding for brain researchers, the Foundation has provided special care facilities to help intellectually disabled children and adults live more independent lives. Rosemary's younger sister, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, became a lifelong activist for mentally disabled children and helped found the Special Olympics.

Though she lived her entire life hidden from the public eye, Rosemary Kennedy's legacy remains profound, both as someone born with intellectual disabilities and as a victim of the lobotomy fad that swept the United States during the 1940s and 1950s. She will be remembered.

February 06, 2015

On May 26, 1947, an article by freelance writer Mildred Brady was published in The New Republic. Titled "The Strange Case of Wilhelm Reich", Brady's somewhat shrill article was subtitled "The man who blames both neuroses and cancer on unsatisfactory sexual activities has been repudiated by only one scientific journal." The article was filled with innuendoes relating to Reich's sexual theories and the "orgiastic potency" that patients received from his orgone accumulators. She concluded the article by stating that Reich's "cult" was growing and needed to be "dealt with". The Food and Drug Administration launched an investigation that same year to look into Reich's health claims which, in turn, drew in the FBI due to their previous investigation.

The rest of the FBI file covers the results of the investigation and Reich's increasingly irrational screeds on the FDA and Mildred Brady. He denounced her as a "Communist sniper" who was acting under orders from the Communist party to discredit him with a smear campaign. To ensure that the government was kept informed of his progress, Reich provided the FBI with copies of all of his research papers on orgone energy that were published at his institute in Maine.

While the investigation dragged on, Reich attempted to interest the Atomic Energy Commission in his orgone research for fear of it falling into the hands of foreign agents. After demonstrating his research for representatives of the Commision, they politely informed him that the experiments were "outside the scope of the Atomic Energy Commission". An internal memo included in the file added that scientists who examined Reich's research were of the opinion that "Reich is mentally unsound in his scientific experiments".

Reich also continued with his weather control research and, in 1952, Reich wrote a letter to the Justice Department stating that he would be traveling to other parts of the country to test out his cloudbusting equipment. After proving that he could affect the weather in Rangeley, Maine, he wished to see if he could affect the weather in "desert country" as well. Reich also added that he would be going incognito under the name of Walter Roner as "suspicion and slander on the part of uninformed or sick people has been and is so rampant in my case, in the United States as well as abroad".

After an exhaustive ten-year investigation,the FDA finally concluded that Reich's orgone treatments involved "fraud of the first magnitude". In February 1954, the FDA applied for an injunction against Reich in the Federal Court in Portland, Maine. The injunction asked for a ban on interstate shipping of orgone accumulators as well as on all published literature relating to the devices. Reich refused to appear in court to defend himself as he argued that a court of law should not be used to judge scientific research. The presiding judge, John Clifford, rejected the argument and granted the injunction.

Reich appealed the decision and turned over documents to the FBI as proof of a "red fascist instigated plot" against the Orgone Institute and the United States. His personal assistant (and son-in-law) William Moise attempted to arrange a meeting with FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to present the evidence in person. After being told that a meeting would not be possible and that the FBI had no jurisdiction in the case, Moise was sent away. The Bureau also received a telegram dated March 23, 1954 from Reich informing them that a snow storm had struck Rangeley, Maine as he had previously predicted. Reich also announced that he would be flooding the East Coast with rain to prove the value of his experiments (the FBI was not impressed).

Federal authorities seized and destroyed all of Reich's orgone accumulators as well as several tons of his publications. In May, 1956, Reich was arrested for violating the injunction after some of his orgone equipment was moved out of Maine. Once again refusing to appear in court, Reich was charged with contempt and forced to appear. After a spirited trial in which he defended himself, Reich was sentenced to two years in prison. Despite an anguished note to J. Edgar Hoover requesting a personal meeting, Reich was sent to Danbury Federal Prison in Maine where a psychiatrist diagnosed him as "paranoid and delusional".

Wilhelm Reich died in his sleep on November 3, 1957 in his cell at the Federal penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania where he had been transferred. The cause of death was given as severe aortic stenosis and myocardial scarring. Not surprisingly, his supporters insisted that he had actually been poisoned an that a conspiracy had been at work to silence him before he could apply for parole. The FBI file includes the results of an autopsy that the family had requested (they had specifically asked that his stomach contents be tested for poisoning) which confirmed the initial diagnosis.

Reich is buried in Orgonon and a replica of his cloudbuster invention stands next to his grave. TheWilliam Reich Museum occupies the same building that used to house his laboratory and medical treatment clinic. Even decades after Reich's death, there is still considerable controversy over Wilhelm Reich. While skeptics regard him as a quack, his early psychodynamic writings have marked Reich as an influential pioneer in psychotherapy. Today, the Wilhelm Reich Museum and Trust guards his memory and sponsors original orgone research .

February 01, 2015

When Rosemary Kennedy died of natural causes on January 7, 2005 at the age of 86, it marked the end to a long and tragic life that was all the more heartbreaking since it began with such promise.

Born in 1918, Rosemary was the oldest daughter of Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy and, as such, was expected to lead a charmed existence. Her father was one of America's wealthiest businessmen and would later serve as ambassador to Great Britain just as World War Two broke out. Her mother was a member of one of the oldest political families in Massachusetts and the daughter of a former mayor of Boston. Born into wealth and high society, Rosemary should have become a socialite like her mother. Unfortunately, the intellectual disabilities that grew increasingly worse as she grew older would ensure that her entire life would be spent away from public scrutiny.

The only details of Rosemary's early childhood come from what her mother and siblings would provide in later years but the problems in Rosemary's motor and cognitive development were clear enough, especially compared to her two older brothers, Joseph Junior and Jack. Her concerned parents tried taking her to numerous specialists for treatment but none of them could provde any answers. While Rosemary started school at the age of five in a regular kindergarten class in Brookline, Massachusetts, it became quickly apparent that she couldn't keep up with the other children in her class. As her mother would later write in her autobiography, "Her lack of coordination was apparent and she could not keep up with the work."

Withdrawn from regular school, Rosemary was eventually sent to the Sacred Heart Convent in Providence, Rhode Island when she was fifteen. After receiving special education involving private tutoring, she eventually learned to read and write at a basic level. Still, she was kept apart from the other children and, aside from occasional social outings, including a tea dance with her brother Jack serving as her escort, Rosemary was kept well-hidden from public. When she was seen at all, it was in carefully controlled settings that kept her "differences" out of the public eye. Though she was presented to the Queen along with her other siblings, Rosemary was otherwise raised and educated separately.

Due to the terrible stigma surrounding intellectual disabilities in children, especially in an era in which eugenics advocates routinely declared intellectually disabled children to be "genetically unfit", only the closest family friends were allowed to know about Rosemary's condition. To most other visitors to the Kennedy family home, Rosemary's failure to interact the way her siblings did was put down to her "shyness."

Rosemary tried her best and apparently functioned as borderline normal for most of her childhood. It was only when she reached her early twenties that her condition grew worse. Whether due to grief at being unable to live up to her parents expectations or for other reasons, she began acting out and became more difficult for her family to control. Along with gaining a great deal of weight, she had also become sexually mature and the "shy child" excuse no longer worked. Not only was Rosemary unable to "pass" as a normal child, but she was also prone to violent tantrums, including throwing objects and even physically assaulting family members. In the summer of 1941, she even assaulted her grandfather, John J. (Honey Fitz) Fitzgerald

John and Rose Kennedy began searching for a solution to deal with their disturbed daughter. Not only were they worried about her violent acting out, but her sexual maturity meant the increasing possibility of a scandal that might damage the future political careers of the other Kennedy children. Even then, John Kennedy Sr. had every intention of seeing one of his sons as President of the United States in time and the stigma that Rosemary brought to the Kennedy name was a particular concern. John Sr. and Rose also had the concern that all parents of children with intellectual disabilities have. Unfortunately, even for the rich and powerful Kennedy family, actual resources for dealing with these kind of problems were almost nonexistent in the 1940s.

Finally, based on the medical advice provided by the costly specialists they consulted, the Kennedys reached a decision. At that time, Rosemary was living in a convent school in Washington, D.C. though reports of her late-night wandering worried her parents even more. The nuns who ran the school even suggested that she might be picking up men and had become sexually promiscuous; something that terrified both her parents. In the fall of 1941, not long after the incident with her grandfather, Rosemary was admitted to Saint Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C. for what her mother would later describe as a "certain form of neurosurgery." In other words, a prefrontal lobotomy.

The surgery was a success, of sorts. Rosemary would never be a disgrace to her family, but it came at a terrible price.